Does somebody owe you a party?

Darren Nelson

There was a time when I thought I must be eccentric because I was one of the very few kids who didn't drink, didn't smoke, and didn't gossip about sex. I'm sure every class and every high school always has had a fair share of nondrinkers, and so forth; but I used to feel I was all alone, and I got to be pretty self-conscious about it.

Actually it wasn't until I was in a new high school that feeling "out of it" bothered me. This was probably because I never had wanted to belong to a crowd. My friends were always just kids who happened to do interesting things—for me that meant camping, hiking, singing folk songs, and writing plays and poetry. We never liked hanging around, or clothes, or drinking parties. And we weren't worried about where we belonged; so that made it easier to decide against drugs, and about such things as dating, and whether we took our schoolwork seriously.

Still, when you're in high school, there are times you suspect maybe you've missed out. The swingers are so visible and vocal; they ran our school. And then there are the advertisements in magazines and on TV, making it look so satisfying, even necessary, to drink and be sexy. You know it's all a come-on just to boost sales, but sometimes it's hard to shake off the impressions.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

One day several years ago I received a telephone...